If you're like most .NET developers, there are a lot of web pages out there that could be of use to you. How many? Dozens? Hundreds? In fact, if you consider all the different aspects of your work, including the things you don't yet know are important, there are probably thousands, if not tens of thousands of web pages and other resources out there that could make a difference to how you do your job.

So how do you find the information you want? Well, you probably go to Google, or Bing. And search engines are great. But you're not just searching the 7,452 pages relevant to your question; you're searching billions of pages. Your success is completely dependent on the quality of your search term, and on how well the information lends itself to being found by a search.

And once you find some information, what then? Is it good, useful, reliable information? Is it complete, or does it send you off on another search for related pages? Have other developers found that source reliable, or that particular bit of information helpful?

There is a partial solution: tagging. Social tagging/bookmarking services and tag clouds on individual sites/blogs help bring a little order to the chaos. But they don't give you the really big picture.

Imagine those 7,452 relevant web pages in print form, as books on your bookshelf. They take up two or three feet of shelf space. And if you pick up one of those books you'll find it's unorganized, just page after page of text in no particular arrangement. There are lots of "see Volume x, page x" references, and there's a heck of a master index, but there's nothing that approximates a table of contents.

That's where DevRoadmaps.com comes in. We leverage the power of tagging to provide a structure, a framework for the software development information that matters to you. And that structure is very much like a table of contents.

A table of contents (TOC) style view is critically important if you're going to make the most out of vast amount of .NET programming information currently available. With a TOC view you can:

• locate information much more quickly by walking down the TOC structure
• view information in context - you can easily see what information is related to your subject of interest
• discover information you didn't know you needed to know

But we don't just use a TOC view alone; we also leverage the power of the social web. So you can find out not just which web pages or other items are in a certain area of interest, but which ones are most popular, or newest, or most highly rated, or up and coming in popularity.

DevRoadmaps.com is your roadmap to everything you want to know about .NET development. It's about the 50,000 foot view of .NET development, where you can get the lay of the land, and it's about being able to drill down to just the information that really matters to you.

We're not online yet, but we anticipate going to beta in the near future. We'll be starting off with a database of around 2000 web pages covering some of the most common areas of .NET development, including ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Winforms, WPF, Silverlight, C#, VB.NET, Visual Studio, and more. We expect the number of web pages grow quickly, both as we feed them into the system and as we receive contributions from our users.

We'll also have original content, mostly in the form of white papers that help you make sense of the many development choices you face.

If you're interested in participating in the upcoming beta or would simply like to keep informed on the progress of DevRoadmaps.com, please join our mailing list below.

About us

DevRoadmaps.com is a project of CoveComm Inc, publisher of Clarion Magazine. For over a decade we've used our expertise in online publishing to help Clarion developers build better, more reliable, more profitable applications.  We look forward to helping the wider world of .NET developers do the same.